Spoole focused his attention on the here and now. He counted two thousand and fifteen robots standing to attention before him, both polished silver Scouts and matt-grey infantry. Behind them soared the red-brick facade of the factory with its tall windows. Through the open doors he could see the glow of the forges, and he felt a glow of pride himself at what had been wrought.
‘Soldiers of Artemis,’ he called out, his amplified voice rolling over the parade ground.
‘Three weeks ago you entered the factory. Not as soldiers, but as robots of Bethe and Segre, of Stark and Born and Raman. Even of Artemis. And in the factory you stripped away your own metal and put aside your old form. Short or tall, wide or narrow, you have all built your new bodies to the same plan, and in this you are now all equal. You have each taken metal and beaten it to the same length, you have knitted electromuscle and threaded it into each other’s arms. You have assembled your own and each other’s bodies.’
He paused. The assembled robots stamped their feet, once, twice. Two thunderous cracks echoed across the parade ground.
‘You have placed the ultimate trust in your fellow robots, allowing them to remove your mind from its old body and to place it in the new. For, as we all know, Artemis is not about individuals, it is about Artemis.’
Stamp, stamp.
Spoole looked down at the marble chips broken from the flagstones by the continued stamping of metal feet. Such power. It was good.
Now he lowered his voice. ‘Let me tell you something,’ he continued. ‘You will have heard the rumours that Turing City has fallen. Well, let me tell you… those rumours are true!’
Stamp, Stamp.
‘… already metal from Turing City is being sent here! Already robots from Turing City are riding towards us, carried here on Artemisian trains! Soon they will march through this city to the factory, and those of you who are still here will look upon them and you will notice they already wear grey infantry bodies. For those who chose to join Artemis have already been presented with an Artemisian body. And yet, on entering the factory, that body will be taken from them! Those of you still serving in the factory may become teachers in order to show these new robots what you have already learned – how to strip apart their grey infantry bodies and rebuild them anew, exactly the same as they were.’
He lowered his voice. ‘And you might wonder why this should be.’
‘You’re boring them,’ murmured Gearheart.
Spoole felt a stab of anger at her remark.
‘You might wonder why this should be,’ he repeated, ‘and yet, think for a moment. Think about how it would be if you too were presented with a body, ready made. Imagine if you were asked to wear a body over which you felt no real sense of ownership. You would no longer be an Artemisian soldier in the true sense of the word. You would be something apart: a mind with no feeling for its own body. You would think of the mind as something separate, something that did not truly belong to this state.’
Over the heads of the assembled multitude, the maintenance robots had finally reached the summit of the three chimneys. A band of clean white was now being drawn through the dirty paint. Spoole felt satisfied. High above them all, the city still functioned. He turned his attention back to the assembled soldiers.
‘There are states that don’t think as we do. There are states that believe that the mind is something special, something apart from the metal that it drives. I should say, rather, there were such states. The last of them fell this morning. Turing City is no more!’
As one, the soldiers drew up their right legs and stamped down hard on the marble surface. And then their left and their right again. The sound of stamping crashed through the city. It shook the painters on their towers, it shook the robots at their forges. Even out in the marshalling yards to the south, the engines and trucks echoed to the sound of stamping feet.
Spoole had to shout over the stamping. ‘Never forget this! How we build Artemis into ourselves. How we weave it into our children!’
The stamping grew louder still.
‘We are Artemis!’
Stamp, stamp, stamp.
He turned to Gearheart, in her half-naked, unpanelled state.
‘Do you think Kavan could do this?’ he asked. ‘Do you really think he could inspire his troops in this way?’
‘He doesn’t have to,’ came her infuriating reply.
Spoole turned back to the soldiers, raising his hands for silence. Instantly the stamping ceased.
‘Listen, fellow soldiers, I want to tell you something else. Look at this city. Look at the factory behind you. Look at the steel curves of the Basilica, the copper roofs, the iron galleries and walkways. Do you understand what you see? Remember the story of Nyro, and how this land was once empty of metal. Remember that everything that you see here comes from elsewhere in the continent.’
Stamp, stamp.
‘Everything! All the iron, stripped from the mountains to the north. All the gold and silver, carried here from the south. Everything! Look at me, you Borners and Bethers and Starkists – Artemisians now, all of you. Look at me! My mind may have been twisted here, but it was twisted of metal brought from your own former states! Remember, Artemis was an empty land. Everything that you see here did not happen by lucky chance; rather it was built solely by the will of Artemis.’
Stamp Stamp. Raised hands. Silence.
‘But why?’ asked Spoole. ‘Why do we do this?’
He paused. The only motion now was the billowing grey smoke and the growing white lines that wrapped themselves around the chimney tops. That and the clouds that moved over the clear sky.
‘Why do we do this? Why this urge to conquer? Why this urge to bring all the metal from across Shull to this place? After all, metal is metal. Does it really matter whether it remains hidden beneath the ground? Why not leave it locked in stone, or forced through the cracks in the rocks? Why not just leave it to rust in the rain and the sun?’
He felt unbalanced at the very thought.
‘You know why. You know the answer as well as I do. It feels wrong to let good metal oxidise. It feels wrong to let metal go to waste. So now I ask a question on a more basic level: why should some metal seek to make copies of itself?’
They were all staring at him now. Eyes that should be fixed directly forward had all swivelled to gaze at him.
‘Sometime in the past a piece of metal made another piece of metal just like itself. So why does some metal sit immobile, when other metal moves? Why does some metal seek to make copies of itself?’
‘Who cares?’ murmured Gearheart.
‘I will tell you why: because that is how it was twisted!’ roared Spoole. ‘Twisted metal seeks to make more twisted metal! This is the basic reproductive urge! What are these bodies that we wear but twisted metal’s way of twisting more metal? And now that same twisted metal, that wire twisted in the pattern of Artemis, controls the entire southern part of this continent! The wire, I say, not the bodies. Oh no, those bodies were built by the wire! You are the proof of this! So I ask you, what should you do now? Simply remain here, twisting dead metal into copies of yourselves?’
He pointed at the Scout nearest to himself: a silver woman, the blades at whose hands and feet were razor sharp with newness.
‘You!’ he demanded. ‘Tell me, should we remain here?’
‘No sir!’
Spoole was delighted.
‘No! Of course not! There is dead metal still on this planet, and if we do not twist it, then some other robots will. Dead metal does nothing, only twisted wire is. Inevitably the metal on this planet will be twisted, if not by us then by others. Well, I say, let it be us who twist it all!’
The stamping began again.
‘It does not end here, robots. To the north there are the mountains. But what lies beyond them? More states, grown rich and complacent on the metal that lies there? Are we to allow them to retain it, those who have never
